@Galactus: sure, but the Civil Rights Era wasn't exactly a case of rainbows and lollipops.
I think kal overstates his case, but his point is important; there's a lot of danger in the usual checks and balances failing, particularly because all the levers of power are in Republican hands, and it would be very hard to undo said damage. It might happen without too much violence, but odds are it won't.

I understood @Kalbear to mean that Trump has to be opposed now, and not just four or even eight years down the line. And that it'll be incredibly hard due to the electoral realities of gerrymandering and the Senate class of '12

HE: I tend to come down in the same direction as you, but I don't think this can be entirely resolved in just one direction, because far too often, speech is also action. As a counterexample: If a representative of a corporation declares that said corporation is bankrupt at a press conference despite this not being the case, shouldn't the corporation be able to fire said employee based on breach of trust?

Scot,
would you argue that Khal Drogo was still a person after Mirri's resuscitation?
Yes, I would argue that somebody who is unconscious is not a person at that point in time. However, I'm unwilling to cede all rights immediately after somebody falls unconscious. Rather, if said person can't be returned into consciousness within a reasonable timeframe, I'm willing to let his letal representatives make the decisions for him, ultimately ceding the power to them.

HE: We can argue about the hate speech laws, certainly. I'm not too fond of them either.
But as for organizations not tolerating certain expression by their employees, I disagree. Because what we're running into there is a conflict between the freedom of association of the employer and many of his employees with the freedom of speech of the employee. It's impossible to resolve without a compromise that gives the organization at least some leeway in not tolerating speech that could be otherwise seen as official position of said organization.

That power ends once the being in question becomes a person. We can debate the cut-off (personhood is a gradual process, after all), but since a baby is far more able to communicate its needs than a foetus, I'd call that an important step. We can even find common ground on third-trimester abortions and make just the ability to survive outside the mother the cut-off point. I'm unwilling to go any earlier though, as before that point, the being in question is essentially a temporary body part of the mother.

Sure. The point is that it's still a consistent moral position that doesn't agree with SerHaHa. I never claimed everybody agreed with that position. But I also think we shouldn't legislate morality when said legislation is likely to make things worse, which would be the next step in the argument.

That person who lives in seclusion certainly has people he or she knows from before choosing seclusion, right?
We can quibble about the details of personhood, but to me it's pretty clear that somebody who is entirely incapable of communication is not a full person indeed.

Which special rights are you speaking of?
You assume that life is the important part, but it isn't. We don't protect animal life, or plant life, and for good reason. What we protect is personhood - and a person is someone with personal relationships. So a fetus, which does not have personal relationships with anybody, is not a person and hence not protected.

No. The only way back to democracy leads through being defeated in war and being forced back into democracy by the victors. That's what happened to Italy and Germany after WWII. Well, or to France after the French and Prussian war.
Sadly, we live in a world with nuclear weapons and where the US has both the best-funded military in the world and is basically unassailable due to its continental isolation. It's not going to happen that way.